This is part of a series on how to study fiction, mainly directed at writers who have read all the beginning writing books and are like, “What now?!?” The rest of the series is here.

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Resources related to productivity/speed issues:

Look for good general productivity, happiness, and habit-changing books and websites, like The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People or Eat that Frog. They often talk about how to practically juggle conflicting priorities.

Look for good writer’s habit books, like The Artist’s Way or Bird by Bird, not to teach you how to write so much as to teach you how to survive the long haul as a creative person. These books will help you dig down to your emotional fears about writing.

Sign up for a writing challenge that will definitely stretch you from your current habits, like National Novel Writing Month, in order to test your skills. It doesn’t have to be NaNoWriMo, and failing one just means “this is not for me.” Don’t harass yourself about failing any writing test. Identify why you didn’t succeed, and look for a different writing test.

Start tracking your word count using different periods of time: five minutes, ten minutes, fifteen minutes, etc. When your words per minute peak, you’ve found your ideal writing session time. (You can often string several shorter sessions together, with a short break to refill a cup of coffee between them.) If you are totally against wordcounts, you can track pages per day–or stories per month.

Look for good books on building writing speed, like 2,000 to 10,000: Writing Faster, Writing Better, and Writing More of What You Love.

Make a note of any distractions that occur in your writing sessions and decide how to get around them. To block selected sites on the Internet, for example, try Freedom software. Make part of your writing routine handling distractions before they can occur.

When you write a piece of fiction, allow yourself to spell-check the work and look it over one time to review for missing pieces, oopsies, or extraneous pieces. After that, send it to an editor for submission or a freelance editor to get it ready for indie publishing.

You don’t have to be perfect. Intermediate writers are still better than 90% of wanna-be writers. You are writers. But, well, you’re not master artisans yet, and nobody expects that you magically turn into ones.